Chapter 13

Chapter 13 of 48 · 8-minute read

Vertex and True Node Conjunct in Prophecy Reading Event Chart

Barefoot, I stand on the bottom step of my back porch and gaze across the backyard to the fire pit, now just coals and tiny wisps of smoke. The bricks are cool under my soles, and the grout between each brick cuts into my flesh. I check my wards. The people I love and the people who are still good for me will have no trouble coming through those amorphous hedges of light and energy, which is why Sonnet had run right through the ward as if it weren’t there. They will keep the bad stuff out, however, as well as anyone with ill intentions towards me.

It’s 3:03 a.m., and it seems this is more the witching hour than midnight. Everyone and everything is asleep, except for Jan standing guard over the kids and that horse-faced thing. I can still feel it even though it’s out of sight on the other side of my house. It’s waiting for me to lower my wards, whether intentionally or out of weakness.

Sonnet wouldn’t say what happened with her dad—only that she had been able to leave and come home. She wouldn’t tell me who drove her or if she walked from her dad’s house, only that she would tell me in the morning. She cried herself to sleep with happiness over seeing me and being back in her mom’s arms. I haven’t seen her that way since she discovered her dad’s porn stash. I don’t want to push her to tell me anything until she’s ready, so I let her sleep and told her we’ll talk about it in the morning.

For the moment, I’m simply going to be grateful that she’s home, safe and sound. Tomorrow, I will find out from her what happened and call my lawyer back and see what trouble Quent is stirring up. For now, I have work to do, no matter how tired I am or how much I feel the pain deep inside me, in spite of my last pain pill.

My backyard is quiet now with the sole exception of a rain frog croaking somewhere in the distance, probably near the lake a half a mile away. Its croaks sound more like barking, and the sound echoes across the empty fields and woods. The sun will be up in a few hours, and I don’t know when I’ll get another chance to perform this little ritual to take care of matters with Lady Dragon.

My arms are full—a small blanket to sit on, rosemary soaked in henbane and wormwood oil, a few scraps of tree wood that aren’t likely to burn longer than the ritual, and Jan’s lighter, which normally stays on the mantel in the living room. With so much stuff piled high in my arms, I steady myself on one foot and feel my way over the edge of the bottom step with the other foot, then cautiously step down into the dewy grass.

Cold. Wet.

Out of nowhere, another memory bubbles up.

I am seated at a wooden picnic table. I lean forward, without touching the tabletop, but wrap fingers around the edge of the attached bench. The wood is dry under my touch, smooth at the edge from years of use. I lean forward as I try to look into a scrying mirror flat in the middle of the table. I see nothing except a dim reflection of the woman on the other side of the table. I’m not sure of her real name, but her craft name is Zephyr.

I am in this moment, having just heard her prophecy for the rest of my life, and I’m shaking my head furiously. She doesn’t use Tarot cards or runes like many of the other members of the Dragon Hart Grand Coven. Instead, she uses a scrying mirror—an ornate frame surrounding a surface of shiny black glass. Fog or maybe smoke rises from it. I see nothing in it, but she sees everything.

I’ll quickly learn that the mirror is only a prop and that she sees everything in each person’s lifetime from beginning to end as memories. For her, all time is now. She knows exactly how she will die, and she knows exactly who will betray her.

But in this moment, I’m both fascinated and repulsed. She is a High Priestess, a beloved Elder of the Grand Coven, and she has chosen to leave. I don’t realize how important it is at this moment, but later I will wonder how it was Lady Dragon allowed her to leave the Grand Coven with blessings. I will also understand that it is out of fear and respect for Zephyr’s talents. Even Lady Dragon doesn’t want to cross the woman who calls herself Zephyr.

I remember her in this moment. I remember staring at her from across the table, dazzling white hair, pale eyebrows, barely visible lashes, and a brightly-colored crocheted hat meant to resemble an octopus. I cannot discern her age. Is she twenty-five? Forty? Older? Her face shimmers in the light of a pair of candles burning on either side of the scrying mirror. She is charismatic, and I really want to be friends with her, except that this reading is a gift to me and I’m the last person she’ll read for in the Grand Coven before she leaves.

Among the Grand Coven, there are two gifts sometimes offered at our annual gatherings: one for new Initiates and the other for newly Elevated Third-Degree High Priestesses and Priests. Occasionally, the gifts are offered to other attendees in need. Leo, a long-time High Priest in Dragon Hart, gives free Tarot readings on the last night of our annual gathering, following the last of the Third-Degree Elevations. Zephyr, on the other hand, unveils the future for every new Initiate, but only after they have taken their vows.

The reading from Zephyr starts with smoke covering the mirror and progresses as she waves her fingers through the smoke, pulling back the veils of the known and unknown. I have absolutely no memory of that reading, except of her dipping her fingertips into the swirls of smoke, parting the wisps, and then watching as all the smoke drifts together in front of the mirror once again. So how is it I am remembering this moment?

This is the moment after she’s told me I’ll have three husbands.

“One will give you hell, but children, and those children will be a blessing many times over. One will bring you joy but heartache. And one will bring you peace.”

I shake my head and tell her she’s made a mistake. I tell her I am happily married to Quent, a man whom I’m convincing myself makes me happy, though underneath is a current of dread, because if he knew I were here in this state park being Initiated by a bunch of powerful witches, he would yell at me for days and tell me how worthless I am.

All I do in this moment, however, is shake my head and say, “You’ve made a mistake. When I married, I married for life.”

Coming back to the present, I drag my other foot off the bottom step and into the cold, wet grass beside the first. I brush off the memory. What if I could find Zephyr again? She’s seen my past, the present at the time of my Initiation, and the future—or at least the future with my second husband and the end of my second marriage. I’m not interested in a third husband. I just want my Jesse back.

But if I could find Zephyr, she might be able to get to the bottom of which magickal person is sending a thought-form as her agent to torment me.

I feel my way along a stone pathway through the grass toward my backyard circle and firepit. Why all these random memories? Is it because I asked the Old Gods for help? Could it be that I’m so exhausted that the memories are coming forth unbidden? Or does it have something to do with my surgery? I’d refused anesthesia, and for damned good reason. Two reasons, in fact.

Part of me is nervous that I might wander away from my body and not be able to find my way back. Most people don’t worry about things like that, but if you’re prone to uncontrolled astral projection, it’s too scary.

And then there’s the other reason. I know what general anesthesia did to Jan, after multiple surgeries, how each round of anesthesia made her a little more off kilter, like she was out of phase with herself, until her fourth surgery in a row seemed to have a cumulative effect from these out-of-phase episodes and she became someone I no longer knew: a person who couldn’t honor my boundaries, who couldn’t tell the difference anymore between her fears and her precognitive dreams. For a long while, those side effects broke our friendship. If I have to have surgery again, and that’s a very real possibility, I have to figure out a way not to have anesthesia. Maybe I’m being unreasonable, but I don’t want to lose who I am, not like Jan did.

I can barely see over what I carry in my arms. Carefully, I set down the folded blanket on top of the altar stone that represents the North, the position in the circle I’ve claimed as my own whether standing to lead a healing circle of close friends or sitting in quiet meditation. Having borne witness to so many rituals over the years, that stone buzzes with energy. I have called down the moon and called in the elements through my raised fingertips and through my crown chakra, bringing down divine energy. I have pulled the energy down through my body and planted it in energetic roots beneath my bare feet, right through that stone.

Tonight, though, there’ll be no more standing on the stone. Instead, I plant my butt on that soft blanket. I’m too exhausted to stand, my inner thighs are sore from clenching in the stirrups on Sandra’s exam table, and both the pilot light where dangerous cells were excised from my cervix and my second chakra burn fiercely with pain. I experienced a similar physical and emotional reaction to my previous cervical surgery.

Nine years ago, as a brand-new Initiate of the Grand Coven, I had learned all about the chakras and how they are traditionally thought of as seven energy centers throughout the main part of the body and head, starting with the first chakra at the tailbone, moving up through the sacral, or womb, chakra up through the solar plexus, up through the heart, up through the throat, up through the brow, and finally ending with a traditional seventh chakra at the crown of my head like a halo. I’ve learned since that chakras can be different in different bodies, and that there can be mini-chakras in the hands and feet as well, plus the high heart chakra between the heart and throat, the place where I have often empathically sensed any trouble Jesse might be in.

That place on my chest between heart and throat has throbbed for months now.

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